4 Player Chess Teams: Tactics (Extended)

Link to previous post here: 4 Player Chess Teams: Tactics

A few people have asked me to make another post on tactics because, well, the last one ended quite abruptly, and there were only two good examples of tactics I posted there. So here are some more.

King Captures

The main goal of any type of chess game (except for antichess or even hyperbullet) is to checkmate the players. However, there is something that is prioritized and even more valuable than checkmate: king captures. This is quite hard to explain with words, so the best way to show you is with pictures.

Take a look at this position. Blue's queen is under attack, but can't he/she just take the rook? I mean, there aren't really any threats. It's just a hanging rook...right? Wrong. There is a threat. Let's draw some arrows to see what the threat is.

As you can see, if blue simply takes the rook, yellow can move his/her bishop to any of the highlighted squares, which puts blue in check, and since red moves before blue, red has the option to capture blue's king. The best move here is to save the queen by bringing it back to the defense of the king with the move Qb8.

But what if we edit the position? Say, green delivers a check to red in between all the chaos. Can red still capture blue's king?

(The pictures were edited: the green queen which used to be on l9 moved to h4.)

Indeed, red can capture blue's king even while in check. This rule applies even when any player is in an otherwise checkmated position! In the case of checkmate, the only legal move is to capture the king if possible. (For FFA, the rules get a bit more complicated, since it's technically a 1v1v1v1, but it's still quite easy to understand.)

Now that you know how king capture work in teams, let's move to some more interesting ideas:

Relative Pins

In the last post, we mainly looked at absolute pins, which is when a piece is pinned to the king. If that piece moves, the king will be in check and so that move is illegal. This time, we will look at relative pins, where a piece is pinned to another piece that isn't the king. The pinned piece can still move, but it wouldn't be a smart move to make as the piece behind the pinned piece will get captured. We will also take a look at cases where there are no pieces to pin, but if the "pinned" piece moves, it hangs checkmate (yes, this is possible, and I assure you, it happens quite a lot...). Here's a quick example:

(Note that this position is completely made up, as you can see from the wacky rook placement: to you, no one knows how it got there)

As you can see by the arrows, red's rook is relatively pinned blue's pawn to his/her queen, and red/yellow's pieces prevent the blue queen from escaping, trapping it. So, a good idea is to keep your pawns intact and defending each other so that holes aren't created (a hole is created when a certain square becomes available as a nice outpost square for an enemy piece: it can no longer be attacked by pawns). By playing the moves c6 and d5, blue weakened his queenside, especially the c5 and d6 squares. Those are places where red could plant a knight or a queen and use it as a pivot square to attack blue further.

Here is an example where recapturing with the wrong piece hangs mate in one:

(The previous position was altered slightly, but the idea is still quite the same.) Red just captured blue's knight on c6, so what does blue recapture with? The queen, or the pawn? Well, as you can see with the arrows, if blue recaptures with the pawn, he/she hangs mate in one with yellow playing Bb6 and red infiltrating with Qa7#. So, the best move is for blue to recapture with the queen.

Hopefully, you learned something out of this. More content coming soon! I'm hoping to make a detailed post on endgames, but for now, this is all.

Nice basic ideas. Looking forward to your ideas in the endgame.

Quality content!

please, FFA players...learn theory

Awesome!

Please, solo players, learn that only one person wins, and that person is whoever gets 1st place, not goddamn 3rd.

wow